Wll the 49ers Have an Emotional Letdown After Losing the Super Bowl?
Last season was supposed to be the 49ers' season.
They had the best roster in the NFL. They were relatively healthy. Their division stunk. Their conference was terrible. The Chiefs weren't nearly as good as they were when they beat the 49ers in the Super Bowl four years ago. The 49ers were the Super Bowl favorites. And yet they still lost.
Will the 49ers have an emotional letdown this season?
You've heard of the Super Bowl hangover. It's a thing. Teams that lose the Super Bowl tend to struggle the following season. The Eagles lost the Super Bowl and then collapsed last season losing six of their final seven games including a Wild-Card playoff game against the Buccaneers. The 49ers lost the Super Bowl four years ago and then went 6-10 the following season.
Which means the 49ers' veterans know how difficult it is to make it back to the Super Bowl. It took them four years to make it back and lots of things had to break their way. A deep pass had to ricochet off a Lions defender's facemask and land in the hands of Brandon Aiyuk in the NFC Championship Game just for the 49ers to get to the Super Bowl, which they lost yet again.
How many years will it take them to get back this time?
That question has to be in the minds of older players such as George Kittle, Kyle Juszczyk and Trent Williams.
Did they miss their opportunity? Will they ever get another one?
GRANT COHN
Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.